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White House Deputy Counsel Resigns

By Charlie Savage May 7, 2010 4:40 pmMay 7, 2010 4:40 pm

5:40 p.m. | Updated Daniel J. Meltzer, a top White House lawyer who has played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the administration legal team, is resigning next month and will return to his tenured position as a Harvard law school professor, the White House said on Friday.

Mr. Meltzer’s last day as the principal deputy counsel to President Obama will be June 1. Since the administration took office, he has worked on nearly every major legal issue the White House has handled, a sprawling portfolio that ranged from domestic policies to national security matters.

“He’s done everything,” said Gregory B. Craig, who served as White House counsel for the first year of the Obama administration and picked Mr. Meltzer to be his deputy. “It’s going to be a great loss for the administration that Dan is going back to the academic world.”

Among other things, Mr. Meltzer played a leading role in the administration’s efforts to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and related policies affecting terrorism detainees.

He was also the White House’s main contact with the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, which evaluates whether proposed policies would be lawful. The acting leader of the Office of Legal Counsel, David Barron, said that Mr. Meltzer had been a “super-calm presence” and a “very serious thinker about hard issues” in their work together.

“It’s a cliché to say someone is a lawyer’s lawyer, but it fits,” said Mr. Barron, who is also a colleague of Mr. Meltzer’s at Harvard as a fellow law professor. “He gives academics a good name.”

In addition, Mr. Meltzer, who teaches courses on the federal courts at Harvard, helped prepare Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor for her confirmation hearings – a role he may reprise in his final weeks by working with Mr. Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nominee, which the president is expected to announce as soon as Monday.

He represented the White House in discussions with the Justice Department about civil cases involving the United States — like detainee habeas-corpus lawsuits and litigation over the ban on military service-members found to be gay – speaking with Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli about three times a week about policy issues and developments.

“The thing about Dan that is different than many academics is that he was able to adjust to the pace of the White House and to apply that same critical thinking to issues as they were passing by at 500 miles an hour, which is remarkable,” Mr. Perrelli said

And he was also a player in the White House’s effort to shepherd the health care overhaul through Congress, including by negotiating and helping to draft an executive order Mr. Obama signed as part of a deal to persuade anti-abortion rights Democrats to back the bill, said Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., a colleague in the office of the White House counsel.

Mr. Verrilli, who praised Mr. Meltzer as possessing a “combination of intellectual brilliance, practical judgment, humility and decency,” said he was “chagrined” that Mr. Meltzer was leaving.

But Mr. Meltzer’s wife did not move to Washington, and he has been commuting back to Boston since taking up the position in January 2009. In addition, because Harvard generally does not want its tenured professors to take more than two years off, Mr. Meltzer needed to return in time to resume teaching classes this fall.

He had originally promised to give just one year to the administration, but the current White House Counsel, Bob Bauer, asked him to stay on longer to handle the transition from Mr. Craig’s tenure, the White House said.

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